true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
is illuminated, the entire image is present. One can do this again and again: the holograph is made up of a nearly infinite number of tiny
images, each of which in combination with its fellows presents one image.
This "holographic" aspect of memory has been assumed to be of central importance by such thinkers as David Bohm and Karl Pri-bram. But it
was Dennis and I who went so far as to suggest that this form of organization could be extended beyond the brain to include the cosmos at
large.
Quantum physics makes similar pronouncements when it states that the electron is not somewhere or sometime; it is a cloud of probabilities
and that is all one can say about it. A similar quality adheres to my idea of time and the comparison of time to an object. If time is an object,
then the obvious question to be asked is what is the smallest duration relevant to physical processes? The scientific approach would be to keep
dividing time into still smaller increments in order to find out if a discrete unit exists. What one is looking for by doing this is a chronon, or a
particle of time. I believe the chronon exists, but it is not distinct from the atom. Atomic systems are chronons; atoms are simply far more
complicated than had been suspected. I believe that atoms have undescribed properties that can account not only for the properties of matter,
but for the behavior of space/time as well.
Chronons may not be reducible to atoms, but I suspect that what we will find is a wave/particle that composes matter, space/ time, and energy.
The chronon is more complicated than the classical Heisenberg/Bohr description of atomic systems. The chronon has properties that make it
uniquely capable of functioning as a
fundamental constituent of a universe within which minds and organisms arise. So far we have been unable to define the dynamic properties
that would allow a particle to participate as a necessary part of a living or thinking organism. Even a bacterium like E. coli is a staggering
accomplishment for the atom of Heisenberg and Bohr.
The Heisenberg/Bohr model allows us to simulate the physical universe of stars, galaxies, and quasars; but it doesn't explain organisms or
mind. We have to overlay that atomic model with different qualities in order to represent more complex phenomena. We must imagine an
atom with new parameters if we wish to understand how we could exist, how thinking, tool-using, human beings could arise out of the
universal substratum.
I don't claim to have done this yet. But I do believe that I have stumbled upon an intellectual avenue that could be followed to achieve this
understanding. The key lies in cycles of temporal variables nested in hierarchical structures, which generate various kinds of fractal
relationships unfolding toward often surprising kinds of closure.
The person who has laid the most firm foundation for understanding this sort of notion philosophically is Alfred North Whitehead. Nothing
we have suggested is beyond the power of his method to anticipate. Whitehead's formalism accounts for minds and organisms and a number
of phenomena poorly resolved by the Cartesian approach.
Other visionary thinkers are probing these areas. Chaotic at-tractor dynamics is the idea that any process can be related through a
mathematical equation to any other process simply by virtue of all processes being part of a common class. The overthrow of a dictator, the
explosion of a star, the fertilization of an egg—all should be describable through one set of terms.
The most promising development in this area has been the emergence of the new evolutionary paradigm of Ilya Prigogine and Erich Jantsch.
Their work has achieved nothing less than a new ordering principle in nature—the discovery and mathematical description of dissipative selforganization
as a creative principle underlying the dynamics of an open and multi-leveled reality. Dissipative structures work their miracle of
generating and preserving
order through fluctuations—fluctuations whose ultimate ground is in quantum mechanical indeterminacy.
If you had a perfect understanding of the universe, you would be able, by applying this insight, to tell a man how much change was in his
pocket. Since this amount is an accomplished fact, it would be, at least in principle, possible to calculate. What is important is to understand
the true boundaries of reality, not the probable boundaries of possible future events. Although boundary conditions operate on the future, they
are probabilistic constraints, not absolutely determined fact. We assume that ten minutes hence, the room we are in will still exist. It is a
boundary condition that will define the next ten minutes in our space/time coordinate. But we cannot know who will be in the room ten
minutes hence; that is free to be determined.
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